


Pieces

by Tierfal



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Fluff, General
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-20
Updated: 2010-02-20
Packaged: 2017-10-07 10:35:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chocolate bars, good books, and tortoise shells.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pieces

The Doctor has his arms folded on the railing, leaning over them to watch the river. He's a dark form in a dark night, and Rose redirects meandering steps to draw up beside him, hugging herself against the chill.

"Have you ever saved the last square of a chocolate bar?" he asks, after a moment has slipped away and drowned in the current below. "Or procrastinated finishing a book, not so much because you thought the ending would be bad as because you just didn't want it to end?" He hunches over the rail, and his eyes are pale even though the streetlamps aim for orange. "I think, sometimes, that there must be a sort of universal hand in everything—threads running through, sort of a thing, so that all the little pieces are just slightly connected. A universal order, maybe; I hate to say 'justice,' and I'll never go for 'plan,' but I think there must be something. And to that thing, whatever it is, I'm the last few pieces of chocolate. I'm the last chapter of a really good book."

The water runs. Rose shifts her weight.

"I watched the Earth explode," she says. "I saw the rubble drifting into space. And it's not the same, not at all—because we can go back. I can see my world again, literally whenever I want to, the way I know it and a thousand ways I don't and never even dreamed of. It's nothing like what you went through—what you're still going through. What you always will be, I guess, because things like that don't heal." She lays her hand on his nearest arm and gently tightens her grip. "But it lets me begin to imagine what that must be like."

"An infinite universe at my fingertips," he whispers, smiling wryly, "and nowhere to call home."

"You're like a tortoise, I think," Rose muses, smiling gently back. "You carry your home around on your back, yeah? Isn't that what the TARDIS is? It's a tool, but it's also the only constant we've got."

"Some things change," he concedes. He sets his hand over hers, and two pulses beat warmly in his palm. "Some don't."

The river's waves slap dully at its banks, and Rose thinks of tortoises—thinks of the tireless crawl. She thinks of how the Doctor's always moving, always looking, always running towards the screams.

She thinks he seeks the wronged and the wounded, the vanquished and the victimized, and fills the shoes of the unlikely savior not because he views it as his destiny—not because the last of the Time Lords ought to play the intergalactic policeman, even if that is what the box decrees.

She thinks he does it so that no one will ever have to hurt as much as he does.

She thinks, as she huddles in and leans her head against his shoulder, that someday he'll realize that he's not alone. Not really.

"I always saved the last bit of my candy bars," she says.

"I should be barred from making analogies when I'm depressed," he replies.


End file.
